Aristophanes

The momentous period in the history of Greece during which Aristophanes began to write, forms the ground-work, more or less, of so many of his Comedies, that it is impossible to...

The comedy which takes its name from the god of riches is a lively satire on the avarice and corruption which was a notorious feature of Athenian society, as it has been of othe...

The satire in this, one of the best-known of Aristophanes’s comedies, is directed against the new schools of philosophy which had been lately developed in Athens, and which reck...

The two first comedies which Aristophanes brought out--‘The Revellers’ and ‘The Babylonians’--are both unfortunately lost to us. The third was ‘The Acharnians,’ followed in the...

The ‘Thesmophoriazusæ,’ as this piece is called in the Greek, is a comedy in which, as in the ‘Lysistrata,’ the fair sex play the chief part, although its whole point lies in a...

The point of the satire in this comedy is chiefly critical, and directed against the tragedian Euripides, upon whom Aristophanes is never weary of showering his ridicule. There...

‘The Birds’ of Aristophanes, though one of the longest of his comedies, and one which evidently stood high in the estimation of the author himself, has comparatively little inte...

It has been observed already,[1] in speaking of these “ancient” classical authors, that some of them, in their tone and spirit, have much more in common with modern literature t...

This comedy, which was produced by its author the year after the performance of ‘The Clouds,’ may be taken as in some sort a companion picture to that piece. Here the satire is...